


Missing Links

by ladygrange



Category: Led Zeppelin
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, a swing hung at one end, and my jaw slammed shut so hard a piece of molar chipped off, between the bit of blood and the lot of tears, i had no fear, i remember wishing it had not happened, long conversations, long planes too, my chin hit the cut edge of the concrete, my great grandmother had one of those poured concrete porches, one afternoon i slipped out just at the swing was coming down, smooth and flat and unbroken, that it does not hurt, the kind of surface perfect for riding a bike but porch sized, there was no railing which meant i could go as high as i liked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:07:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26980042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygrange/pseuds/ladygrange
Summary: I wrote this piece with inspiration from Tony Palmer’s article in The Observer on May 18, 1975, as well as that photograph of JP asleep on the Starship, which I think was taken by Neal Preston around mid January of 1975. Emma quotes from two articles, one review for the Detroit show on Jan 31 and the other for the Chicago show on January 20. I mashed some dates around because I wanted to align the details closer to JP’s injury. I hope it’s not too confusing!Emma refers to George Massenburg, a renowned engineer who worked with Little Feat. JP used the b bender to play TYG live but as far as I could read, he didn’t use it on the studio track.The final line comes from a passage in A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’ve referenced it before, and I keep returning; it has some richness for me that I never get tired of. Here’s the section: “There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join.”Thank you for reading <3
Relationships: Jimmy Page/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	Missing Links

It is January 23, 1975. Although, she’s learned that thousands of meters in the air extrudes time, compressing and stretching and speeding it up. Somewhere outside Chicago, a neon blip on an important radar, it’ll be her third, no Philly was the third connection. This is the fourth airplane of the day. The fourth since Peter’s harried voice came through the phone while she’d been half asleep at Plumpton. She’ll feel the plane even when she lands for the final time; a distorted equilibrium like being on a ship for days, a stranger to solid ground. Whatever miniscule canals inside her ear which dictate these things shift uneasily at the unexpected turbulence. She sidesteps clumsily across the aisle, away from the bar stocked with caviar, smoked salmon, and every liquor imaginable. She glances down and smiles at her good fortune––not a drop of tea spilled. 

Clothes sit in small heaps on the narrow bench lining the wall of the plane; a gaudy herringbone affair that performs better in the dim lighting. Amongst a coon skin cap, a coat, another coat, something fur lined, and a thin stack of papers and magazines, Jimmy has fallen asleep. 

His legs extend into the aisle and almost reach the plush leather theater seats across from him, hands folded across his abdomen. The cabin is night soaked save the artificial rings of safety lights. Each one reveals and conceals. She walks wobbly towards him. 

“Jimmy,” she nuzzles his name against the pink shell of his ear.

He makes a fitful sound and rolls his head to her, then his expression opens like it had just hours ago when she’d seen him on the freezing tarmac. When she was fatigued from travel and pressed against his chest within a second. 

“It took me a bit to find everything,” she offers him the mug, steam-warmed and soothing. “Bonzo helped me.”

Jimmy scoots himself up into the bench and takes a cautious sip. He’s careful not to use the left––she’d wanted to press him into getting a temporary brace, to no avail. Blood is trapped purple under his nail, a bruise she’s told will fade over time. And over time, a callus will form between the fracture; strong new bone will reach out and knit the pieces together. 

She pulls her bottom lip back and forth between her teeth.

“Are you feeling better?”

Her question is light to betray the heavy––the ice bath and it’s brutal, paralyzing cold. Jimmy bore it with a clenched face. He nods and takes another swallow. 

Gingerly, he switches the mug to his other palm, and places his good hand against her thigh. Warmth travels the thick winter wool of her skirt and the fleece of her stockings. He makes idle circles with his thumb. 

He is exhausted after takeoff, after the pain of a fracture played on too long––she remembers the ghostly splintering on the x-ray. Pebbles of bone form his wrist, each one smaller than she could have imagined; the interior laid out. An angiogram as well, fingers outlined in lightning strikes. 

She makes to get up. “Let me get you -”

Jimmy’s hand tightens on her thigh. “No, don’t get up. I…” He nods beside him to the papers, smiles a touch. “Did you read one?”

“‘Zeppelin were shooting from the groin?’” she quotes with a grin. “‘Still kings of the funky, heavy metal?’”

Jimmy eases into a full smile. “I don’t think any of them know about the acoustic sets.”

“Mm, bring it back and get John to sing,” she nods to Jonesy. He’s at the backgammon board, pretending to let the tour photographer win while dryly avoiding questions about the upcoming LP. 

“Maybe,” Jimmy muses, fading into contemplation. He pinches the fabric of her skirt between his fingers and smooths it out. Does so a few more times before he looks at her. “It’s different now.” 

She smiles ruefully. “I hadn't noticed, what with the laser show and thirty thousand watts of PA, was it? About forty tons of stage and light equipment.” 

Jimmy purses his lips. “Who've you been interviewing?”

“No one,” she laughs. “Peter was chuffed to tell me.” 

“Bit loud,” he says, pleased and pursed at once. 

Another bout of turbulence jolts the cabin. Everyone aboard goes silent except for the distinct, displeased groan from John Henry; he’d be sick for hours at this rate. 

Hushed chatter resumes, the plane levels. 

With the mug of tea balanced in his palm, Jimmy reaches around both her legs to bring them across his own. He relaxes when she settles against his side. He is warm and woolen––sleep tempts her. In between her yawn and Jimmy taking sips, she catches Robert further down the plane, chin on his fist, looking at Peter with consternation. 

Whether or not Cole would get sacked isn’t up to Robert. With vocal cord surgery and a nasty case of the flu wearing him down, he has enough on his plate. Peter tries to keep him away from the snide reviews who felt it their duty to point out Robert’s changed voice. He’s usually successful. 

She traces the inside seam of Jimmy’s blue jeans lightly with her nail. 

“I listened to the acetate you left at the house,” she says. “Fixed the Revox, too.”

Jimmy scrunches his nose. “Had that hiss, didn’t it?”

“Mm, needed a new transducer.” She presses a smiling kiss to his jaw. “You wore the old one out.”

Crinkles spread from the outer corners of his eyes. “It wore _me_ out, darling.”

He finishes the last bit of tea. “Did you like the string bender?”

She hears that country twang clearly in her mind’s ear; a semitone lift which mimics pedal steel. She also remembers his elation when he’d gotten it, perfect for playing live. _Big_ smile, the biggest.

“I did, yeah.”

Jimmy nods absentmindedly, flits his gaze to her. “You’re going to take the job?”

She sighs. “Dunno just yet.”

“Little Feat wants you.”

The corner of her mouth lifts. “Want might be a strong word.”

“Unless?”

She takes the empty mug from him and sets it on the table across from them.

“Unless nothing, I don’t think. I’d like to take the one with Massenburg but…”

She trails off, and finds Jimmy looking at her intently, shrewd and figuring. She meets him in the stare down until his mouth wavers. Crinkles again. He takes her legs back over his.

“Deeper in the nuts and bolts, Emmaline.”

She shrugs. “He wants to build a studio. _And_ he wrote the book on equalization. I get that feeling, you know the one.”

Jimmy nods, serious, and puts his hand round her head to bring her close for a kiss to her temple, pressing his words. “You should take that one. It excites you.”

“I’d be away.” 

She says this mostly to his sweater front, lower case lambdas round and round and round. He smells of himself beneath everything. If a bath were available, she’d put them both inside. 

“Take it,” Jimmy says, jostling her against his lips. 

“Okay,” she whispers.

Jimmy sits his chin atop her head. 

On the plane, in air, in between, the quiet desperation of suddenly having nothing to do in the middle of the night erupts less into a hotel room destruction and instead, sits in a jelly. Preserved, available, but not in use. 

Jimmy keeps his injured hand on his knee; from this angle his ring finger looks perfectly well, no train door mishaps at all. Although his nail might fall off from the pressure underneath, the doctor warned. At the appointment, Jimmy had joked about being the newest nine fingered guitarist. She reaches for his wrist to decipher the tendons below, the divot below his thumb. Jimmy gives her leave to handle him carefully, watching beneath his eyelashes. He flexes just slightly - long and graceful. Flinching. In pain.

“I’ve got to play the runs with my index and middle with a little help from my pinky,” he says this quietly into her hair.

She grimaces and looks up at him. “Surely it’s cramped after all that.”

Jimmy nods. He looks on the cusp of words. 

She straightens up and cups his jaw, the tightness there, words clamped between his jawbone. After a moment, Jimmy leans into her hold. 

“They’re sticking in the strings.”

“What is?” she asks. 

“My bloody -” Jimmy’s gaze slants to the floor of the plane. “My fingers. I can’t play blues at all, can’t bend notes. I’m….”

She loosens the scarf knotted around his neck and slips the blue polka dotted silk free of his collar. Then she unbuttons the top button of his shirt. A kiss goes to his throat; a warm and fragrant spot. Jimmy makes a little sound of relief. 

She draws away, saying, “You’re disappointed.” 

“I can’t do all I can do.”

“I know.” She folds the scarf into his jacket pocket. “You always want to do your very best.”

“If it were just down to playing...”

“Yes,” she nods. “None of the rest of it.” 

None of the rest of it; no relentless disorientation. 

The whole of the year stretches out: a few months in America, then the Earl’s Court shows, and a slew of interviews to make a point about their media presence. Even then, Swan Song needed more attention. There was cautious talk of spending long holidays in Europe to avoid England. No amount of euphemisms could disguise the real potential of exile. And besides, it was only preliminary. Much too early to make final decisions.

Jimmy reaches for the spring loaded clip holding her hair up and away. The whole of it falls chocolaty down her shoulders and waist to pool on the bench, one long lock barely grazes the floor. He puts the clip on his jacket lapel and reaches for her shoes. 

“What are you doing?” she laughs softly. 

“Lie down with me.”

He’s got the second shoe off, head bent down from her. He grazes the arc of her toes inside her stockings, then places her shoes next to his. All one handed, no less. She raises her brows. 

“Here?”

“Yes.” His eyes flit from the cape her hair’s made round her shoulders, to her mouth still faintly curved. 

“Here.” 

She lies inside, with Jimmy's leg tossed over both of hers, his face very close. He takes an undue amount of care putting her hair between them so it’s not caught uncomfortably. She watches him, puzzled and endeared. They are close enough that she can mark the division of his pores.

Jimmy puts a thumb under her eye, where it’s bruised from lack of sleep. “Tired girl. Time zones have never agreed with you.”

She gives him a little smile. 

Across from her, one either side of the console holding a screen for movies, the square windows show impenetrable black and become mirrors. They’re above the clouds, above bad weather. People have begun to fall asleep in the recesses of the plane. The backgammon board sits lonely now.

“They keep throwing firecrackers.”

In these private moments things are admitted. Allowed. 

“I’ve started to dream about them,” Jimmy says.

Her brows pull together. “You dream that fireworks are being thrown at you?”

Jimmy nods. “Keep waking to that pop sound, but of course, it’s not really there.”

But then, he’s dreamed of the stage before; in the past, it’s fallen apart, board by board. Crowds have rushed against it, and they’d played above a pool in the winter of ‘71 and the steep drop just below everything. 

She wishes briefly for the continuity, the monotony, of his session days. No armed guard stood at his door every day and night. 

Wordlessly, she slips her hand inside his jacket and around his waist. Jimmy cups her cheek, the one not squished against the cushion. 

“Often?” she asks.

Jimmy circles his thumb in her chilled skin. “Just depends.”

Depending on the show, the exchange, whether or not the crowd listened to Robert when he asked them to stay seated, not to break the barricade, not to throw things at the stage. 

Jimmy looks at her, in thought, thumb following the slope and bridge of her nose. Words form and dissolve behind his eyes. He arrives at them with his fingers sunk into her hair.

“Do you remember, all those years ago, on the beach? You read to me about men and women wrecked.”

She nods.

“Are you wrecked right now?”

Her cheek presses into his hand, into a small smile. “Only a little. What makes you think of it?”

“Remind me who wrote it.”

“Walt Whitman.”

“Yes,” Jimmy smiles faintly. “He had a lot on his mind.”

That look––he has a lot on his mind, comings and goings. Take off then touching down; a sea of boisterous faces in cities that begin to blur one after the other after the other.

He scoots closer. “Last night, all I could relate to was what’s in my hands. That’s it. The. The sort of concreteness of it.”

“Of the guitar.”

“Mm, and the pedals, they’re always taped to the same place.”

The fixed point, she thinks. For all the unknowns, the zig zagging, and the bloated stage crew, that particular detail remains consistent. Everything onstage has its place. 

“I thought of you, last week.”

She makes a questioning sound, prompting him down the tangled line of his thoughts.

“They’d lit trash bins, the big ones, you know.”

“Who had?”

“The guards, after the show. Peter said someone tried to steal a car from us. We got out as fast as possible, and there were three at least, ablaze in the street. Trying to block anyone following.”

She understands, and molds her hand at the back of his head more firmly. 

“You thought of Milan.”

“Milan and every other place that’s ended like that. Just in _bits_. Had enough to drink that I forgot and slept.”

“And how did you sleep?”

He shakes his head. “Poorly.”

She would take it from him, if she could, would have him rinsed of worry. Rinsed of things that kill pain and offer relatives of relief, cousins of sleep. Some distant relation of peace but always, without fail, counterfeit. She shakes her thoughts aside and looks at Jimmy squarely, with all the steadiness she can muster.

“I didn’t tell you this, then,” she says. “On that beach. Whitman spent the rest of his life going back to that collection, he never put it down for good or made one final, definitive version. It was never done for him.”

“Never done.”

“Mm hm.”

Jimmy releases a slow, hot sigh between them. 

“I think,” he closes and opens his eyes, “that I want you too much sometimes.”

“How do you mean?”

“In an all the time way.”

She breathes a laugh. “You’re flattering me.”

“ _No_ , I…” He searches, looking lost and striving. “What I mean is, you can go anywhere, and I…well I can go anywhere as well but you can get off this plane.”

Every teasing plea on his part for her to join him at work, to work with him or for him, replays. Naked sincerity would peek under his words at times. At times she thought he’d either missed her over the touring months or grown weary of life on the road. A new realization arrives to her with an awful sting. 

“You aren’t trapped, Jimmy…” She puts her hand to his chest, palm flat. “You’ve got the Sahara coming up after Earl’s Court, a nice holiday, some time to write in between things.”

“I know that,” he says, gruff, too harsh. He takes a breath through his nose. “ _Emmaline_ , I…”

“You know that,” she repeats gently. 

His hand resumes it’s slide in her hair. 

Her eyes slide shut in pleasure, gone long without it, she forgets how he follows the curve of her scalp to the tenderness where her neck begins. She opens her eyes to his pinched brows, a little furrow between them. With only a slight alteration, she wiggles her leg around his, twining vines that grow up fences and brick. 

“Go on,” she murmurs.

Jimmy opens his mouth. Closes his mouth. He looks low, between them. Right at her. His hand stops right at the place where he’d hold her head against him protectively. 

“Nothing’s coming.”

Worry spurts in her chest. “What do you mean?”

“I mean no melodies, not even the beginning of an idea. I think it will, you know, something will spark. But it fizzles, even when I have it in my hands.”

“Even when you have the guitar in your hands…”

“Nothing comes,” he finishes, looking as if he’s run a long way. 

These days he packs less clothes and more wall hangings, more curtains to keep out prying eyes, something to simulate privacy. Something familiar instead of artificial rooms, some color amongst the bland or tacky hotel decor. They always smell of incense long after he returns home. 

She presses her mouth to his cheek, where Jimmy is stubbled and a bit coarse, then the corner of his mouth. 

It will heal, she wants to say; the fracture will fix itself and he will refill the well. She has the distinct sense behind her breastbone that he aches with impatience and restlessness. The type of restlessness that makes sleep impossible. And conversely, the type of restlessness that demands sleep. 

She kisses his lower eyelid; their distinct shape is remarkable, a fullness accentuated under his lids, normally plump and now flat. 

Jimmy catches her gaze with an alert quality that arcs between them. Always something like the flick of a cat’s tail, the balance of whiskers. A necessary acuity. 

She nuzzles close.

“When I was a child,” she murmurs, tracing the pink, velvet cartilage of his ear. “And it was night, and dark and quiet, and everybody in the house was asleep, I’d stand at the second floor landing. Just stand there at the top of the stairs, and think to myself, no one knows I’m still awake. No one even knows I’m alive right now. It put this hollowness in my belly.”

“What did you do?”

She breathes a laugh at his seriousness. Closes her eyes. “I’d want desperately to wake someone. To shake them awake and make sure they knew I was there.”

She opens her eyes. Jimmy watches her with such focus, with his brows knit. At the question there, she shakes her head.

“I never got my courage to wake anybody.”

Jimmy reaches to stop her tracing hand and clasp it to his cheek. His lips move against the heel of their overlaid palms.

“Why not?”

“Dunno.” She shrugs, then sheepishly curls her lips. “I thought I’d get in trouble for being up.”

Jimmy turns his face into her hand. 

“Emmaline,” he kisses her name into her palm. “I’m sorry, my darling.”

“It’s okay,” she says, voice hushed. “Doesn’t happen much anymore.”

Jimmy gives her palm another kiss, “I wish we were naked."

“We are.”

Emma untucks his shirt from his waistband and slips her hand under his shirt, seeking the smooth, hot skin of his back. The position cinches them close, closer than before. Their bellies meet and part, meet and part.

“Is that better?”

Jimmy makes a helpless sound. And he reaches, almost shy, for a kiss.

It’s a slow opening, a revelation. She tastes tea she’d made and he’s had, his lips firm and hot, tongue searching. A subtle, masculine sound rises in the back of his throat when she sucks his tongue gently. Her toes curl. Here in the kissing, where her nose notches with his and she has his hair thick between her fingers, she pours her language out––that tender reassurance. 

Jimmy widens her mouth to lick at her tongue; a wet and soft abrasion as if he were between her legs. He takes the kiss as far as it will go clothed and leaves off with small, punctuated kisses that make their lips stick and release. He nuzzles her nose and cheeks for long moments after. 

She waits for their breaths to match once more. Meeting and parting. Jimmy must be prickly under the layer of his shirt and sweater, pink in the chest. Heat gathers in back of her neck, inside her stockings, under the pale crinkle of her blouse. 

She strokes his hair back. Strokes in the rhythm of his breaths. 

“And anyway,” she ventures. Softly, solidly. His eyes flutter open, thick lashed, half-tilted in his face. She cups the back of his head. “If you are there, at the top of the stairs, know that I am here with you. I know you are there.”

In his seeking gaze, the plane falls away; sheet on top of sheet of aluminum and engine and wire, fuselage and wings. The last hush of voices and the clutter on the floor vanishes. Schedules cease to exist or matter. 

She rubs her forehead against his, murmuring, “I am here with you.”

He arrives at her words with a nod. Takes a breath. 

Wrapped round her back, his good hand releases the taut hold he’s got on her and reaches for her neck. His grip is shivering and intimate. Their arms cross. And when Jimmy melts into her gaze there is only that bracing, that hold. He settles easy, the long line of him unfurled. She knows that liquid green. 

She knows his blushed neck in her palm, and hers in his. The whole deep seize of it––that seeing poured between them. The root of all their relations.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this piece with inspiration from Tony Palmer’s article in The Observer on May 18, 1975, as well as that photograph of JP asleep on the Starship, which I think was taken by Neal Preston around mid January of 1975. Emma quotes from two articles, one review for the Detroit show on Jan 31 and the other for the Chicago show on January 20. I mashed some dates around because I wanted to align the details closer to JP’s injury. I hope it’s not too confusing! 
> 
> Emma refers to George Massenburg, a renowned engineer who worked with Little Feat. JP used the b bender to play TYG live but as far as I could read, he didn’t use it on the studio track. 
> 
> The final line comes from a passage in A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes. I’ve referenced it before, and I keep returning; it has some richness for me that I never get tired of. Here’s the section: “There is not only need for tenderness, there is also need to be tender for the other: we shut ourselves up in a mutual kindness, we mother each other reciprocally; we return to the root of all relations, where need and desire join.”
> 
> Thank you for reading <3


End file.
